This is kind of terrible. Capitalizing on people's loss by selling them a pie in the sky dream. I admire the ambition, but I would think we would need to create an AI that can sufficiently pass the Turing test before we create one that represents a person's personality well enough to fool the person's closest family/friends.

Pffft, not impressed. I ran this same mission in Kerbal Space Program and it was a piece of cake.

This is the best thing I've read all week. Thank you.

Tornado touches down and vaporizes the Responsive Ed corporate headquaters. No hands were lost, but several people were struck by flying Stop signs.

I can just imagine the response from the intern who was asked to do this. "You want me to do what? ... Wait, how many?"

Google wouldn't intentionally cause discomfort for its userbase without a good reason. My list includes the following possiblities:

1) The feature is being improved/expanded and is still in testing phase.
2) Patent infringement (or the claim of) has caused the feature to be removed, at least temporarily.
3) The feature will reappear in a non-free version of the same service.
4) The feature is being exclusively licensed (along with the map data) by another party.

This causes amazing ideas to race through my head. Imagine a much more mature version of this - one that could take input and even pull from other resources. For example, try to imagine a system that understands surfaces and textures, and even has access to the internet (or a built-in library) to derive work from. You tell the program to create a 3D castle similar to one in Scotland. It pulls information (either provided or on it's own) and from that it can create procedural textures, 3D surfaces to map those textures to, and then boom...a castle. Eventually it would understand night and day, sounds that are associated with certain environments, lighting, varied architecture, natural terrain...the possiblities are endless. And instead of having a slew of developers and artists trying to create a cohesive image over weeks or months, you have a singular entity creating this content on the fly, limited only by the amount of CPU cycles at your disposal. What an amazing science fiction story that could play itself out in reality if this idea was matured.

Creating a standard interface that only easily (and fully supports) the connection of Android-based devices. Frankly, I'm shocked Apple didn't already make this move. If this happens (and spreads), the only devices you'll want to hook up to your car will be Android-based since those will probably be the only ones you can interact with using steering wheel controls, etc.

Any "terrorist" with half a brain assumes the NSA is looking at all standard comms now. To keep tapping these mediums is beyond pointless.

This probably happens more often than we think. Frankly, it makes sense to validate that a card is going to run solid for someone before you send it to them if they're going to be blabbering all over the interwebs about it. It's just in this case they got burned (and justifiably) due to the fact that the software/driver adjusts the frequency independently instead of being a static clock speed (something they should have disclaimed to the reviewers).

Were the drawings found next to the surface where they made the sandwiches?

But why is this on Slashdot? This isn't a discussion on the engineering of the gas or the dispursement methods used, just a news article.

If that were true it would only take one day to reach a speed of 1.9 million miles/hour. Pretty sure that's not happening.

Can't wait to see the pit stop times for this thing. Do those stopwaches measure in hours?

Either I'm really good at tuning out the ads or you're just really bad at it. While my preferred gaming platform is PC, I still use my PS3 and 360 and don't feel they're overburdened with ads any more than Steam or the likes. If anything it seems worse on PC.